1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming system and an image forming method.
2. Description of Related Art
When finishing processing is executed while ejecting a large amount of sheets in an image forming system, if a sheet is tried to be removed without stopping the processing, there is a possibility that the ejecting sheets are touched by a hand so that a paging disorder occurs. Therefore, it is necessary to stop the processing to remove the ejected sheet after sheet ejection of the number of sets/sheets/jobs predetermined for performing the finishing processing.
Consequently, there has been proposed an image forming apparatus which includes an interleaving sheet mode in which a sheet is inserted to a given position of one sheet bundle, and which temporarily stops an image forming operation whenever the one sheet bundle including the inserted sheet is ejected, in order to enable confirming the created sheet bundle (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-95519).
In addition, there has been proposed a sheet finishing apparatus which temporarily stops sheet finishing processing to enable taking out the sheet when a user depresses a taking-out request switch even while the finishing processing is executed (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. Hei 09-73205).
However, by the apparatus of Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-95519, though it is possible to temporarily stop the operation per the one bundle, the extra interleaving sheet needs to be inserted and thereby incurs waste. Moreover, when the inserted interleaving sheet is unnecessary, an additional work to remove the interleaving sheet from each of the sheet bundles has to be performed. Furthermore, a position to which the sheet is inserted is limited to a given page break within one job, and a user can not arbitrarily stop the processing per the desired number of sets/sheets/jobs.
Furthermore, though the apparatus of Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. Hei 09-73205 can achieve an object to temporarily stop the apparatus for removing the sheet bundle, a user needs to look for a right time for the operation as seeing a display on an operation panel. Therefore, it is difficult for a user to depress the taking-out request switch at a proper timing to stop the processing per the accurate number of sets/sheets/jobs.